This year the Festival Family Day was busier than ever with over 1,800 visitors of all ages. Perhaps one of the most popular offerings was the three Organic Orchestra instruments; The Carrotene (piano), the Percolator (drums) and the Rhubarbium (tubular bells). As full volume from the three 200Watt amplifiers was a bit much for the older adults the volume controls were regularly turned down, only to be turned up again, after a little while, by younger adults... As these instruments appear to work by magic, explaining the function was a challenge.

The more academic visitors quickly moved on to the Coder Dojo and Code Club section (see left), where a lot of concentration went into code design, the graphical programming language 'Scratch' and other teaching technology.

An 'Ender 3' 3D printer was demonstrating how to print "Smoothies" for blowing bubbles inside bigger bubbles. These were a small part of the entertaining performance by highly skilled bubble maker Philip Noble at the next activity.

Most importantly, The T-Exchange stand was well supported by members with 11 taking part, including 3 Juniors.

Founder Member, Maarten de Vries returned to render a talk on music synthesisers; with sound effects. i.e. with the support of eight or more (it was hard to tell) boxes of electronics and audio amplifiers.

This turned out to be not so much a talk as a full-bloodied tour de force, covering everything from the first Moog synthesisers via East versus West Synth Style (look it up) to the latest cutting edge devices.

We were all a bit stunned by the performance, not so much by the electronics (we're used to that) but by Maarten's incredible skill at twiddling the multitude of knobs and switches with microsecond timing. Wow! He even finished up with an electronic chanter, which supported by the synthesisers filled the room with a hundred pipers an' aw' an aw'(or was it awe)

Weel done Maarten. A brilliant exposition. Thank you.

As usual, Mark Dammer is ahead of the rest of us and provided backup to Maarten demonstrating the latest software synthesisers. For anyone who would like to follow up:- If you have a Raspberry Pi with the latest software you have Sonic Pi and you have a synthesiser to explore.

Maybe the image below gives you some idea of the impact the evening made on the members.

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March - News on European Makerspaces

Recently, we welcomed two visitors from the European makerspace movement VULCA, Alexandre (on the left) and his colleague Clemence (second from the right).

The visitors met with our trustees and filled us in how makerspaces were growing across Europe. The Vulca Makers Mobility Program had over 100 volunteers from European makers pace who had collectively visited over 250 makerspaces in Europe. We were informed about an earlier European Commission study that had visited 28 countries and generated a report Available here.

A map extracted from this report is reproduced below.

It was interesting to see that for the four major countries in the EU this study had recorded the following numbers of makerspaces: France 158, Germany 151, Italy 133, the UK 57. The UK numbers included The T-Exchange and 3 others in Scotland.

The number for the Netherlands was 54; just about the same as for the whole UK.

Our next T-Exchange meeting is on Friday 15th March

Come along and join in with the Moray Firth MAKERSPACE

in the "Garden Room" at the Findhorn Village CentreDoors open at 7:00pm for 7:30pm start

If you are a 'Maker' - come along and join in

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The next STEAMIE is at Horizon Scotland
on Friday 1st March 2019 at 10:00 am.

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Would discussion with like or even unlike minds help you to make stuff ?
Are you interested in advanced technology such as: